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“I promised you Texas,” I said as I held open the door of a 1986 red Ford F-150. I remembered when my granddaddy brought it home for the first time, thrilled to death to have it. I was nine. He’d tossed me the keys on my sixteenth birthday with a stern warning that I was not to wreck or sell it.
My nose was hit with the smell of leather. The cab was clean as a whistle, not even a stray piece of straw. I’d asked my dad to have it here, wanting the twenty-minute drive to the ranch alone with Muriella. Once we got there, everyone would be waiting, and I’d have to fight for her attention. Also, I needed the time to prepare myself for what was ahead.
Once I was in the driver’s seat, the old girl cranked right up with a roar. I flipped the knob on the heater as far over as it would go, rubbing my hands together a few times to warm them up. “You can’t sit over there,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re too far away.”
She slid across the bench seat without protest, another surprise. When we’d pulled up to the plane in New Jersey, I wasn’t sure she’d get on it. Yet she had without hesitation.
She straddled the gearshift, and I buckled her seatbelt before fastening my own and turning up the radio.
Thompson Square was singing the exact thoughts running through my head in “Are You Gonna Kiss Me Or Not.” Just being near her was enough, but I missed the way she tasted. I decided to hell with it, turned her face to mine, cupped her soft cheeks, and pressed my mouth to hers. I didn’t even give her time to get used to it before I broke away and shifted into first gear.
She stared at me, but held onto my hand, and my confidence grew. “So this is Burdett?” Muriella’s presence made this homecoming all the sweeter. I’d wanted to get her here for years, and now that she was, it felt right.
“Just outside it. Town’s back that way.” I threw my thumb over my shoulder when we turned out onto the highway, the pavement no longer black but bleached from the sun. “We’ll ride through later if you want.”
“I’d like to see it before we go.”
My confidence rose another notch. Maybe I was getting ahead of myself, but it had to be a good sign. “That can be arranged. We’re about four hours west of Dallas, and the ranch is fifteen or twenty minutes away.”
She nodded, scanning every bush, blade of grass, head of cattle, even the cerulean sky. She absorbed Texas like she couldn’t help herself, but I knew how easily the state could get in a person’s blood, even if you weren’t a native. There wasn’t a house for miles, and passing another car on the way home was an iffy proposition. Something about this wide open space hooked people before they even realized it had happened.
“That was a nice runway for the middle of nowhere,” she commented.
“We breed and train quarter horses at the ranch, some for other people. Lots of those folks have their own jets, so we have a nice landing strip for them. Can’t do anything about this road, though. Not enough pull with the Department of Transportation,” I said as I veered to miss a pothole.
“Seventy-five seems like a high speed limit for this road.”
“You get used to it.” I wasn’t going anywhere near that on the two-lane highway, not because I was scared, but because I wanted to drag out every second of this ride with her.
“It looks different than I imagined,” she mused. “And the air is dry.”
“That it is.” I settled our hands on her thigh, and she glanced at them. “What did you picture?”
“I never could decide if it would be like the desert or one giant pasture. Turns out it’s a combination of both.”
“That’s a fairly accurate assessment. This is where the two landscapes sorta blend together.”
“I didn’t expect it to be this cold either.” She shivered, and I considered pulling over to give her my coat, but she huddled closer to me, and I adjusted the vent to blow more directly on her.
“It gets colder than a well digger’s belt buckle in the winter, but who the hell knows—today the high is in the forties, tomorrow it may be in the sixties. Anything is possible.”
Her brows shot up. “Where do you come up with these sayings?” Texas was already having its intended effect; she seemed less burdened.
I motioned out the windshield. “You’re looking at it.”
A scrub brush rolled across the road, and she watched in fascination. “Did you get everything sorted out with the ranch?”
“Zegas is working on it.”
“You never told the rest of your family?”
I didn’t much care for the disappointment in her voice. “Hopefully, there’ll be no reason to.”
I slowed the truck as the gate to the driveway came into view. Daniel’s team had done a hell of a job clearing the paparazzi. There wasn’t a soul in sight. We turned onto the dirt road, rumbling under the black metal archway that read ‘Jacobs Ranch’ with a Texas star on either side of it.
